Keyboard Sports Offers A Preview Peek Via Humble Monthly

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Keyboard Sports [official site] takes the entirety of your keyboard and turns it into a gamecontroller/landscape, as well as embracing the wordplay potential of the idea. It’s a really charming (I either use that word too much or just gravitate towards things that are charming) game and I’ve been playing the preview version which, I believe, will be available as part of November’s Humble Monthly subscription thingummy while the devs, Triband, work to finish the full game.

The idea is to make use of the keyboard layout as a navigable plane with corners at “¬, “backspace” “left CTRL” and “right CTRL”. By pressing a key you move your little avatar to that position. This lets you navigate Trogger-esque streams of traffic, cross crumbly pathways over lava, rush down ski runs and tip cargo off a plane by fiddling with its balance. At the end of the preview is a high score attack segment where you hold one key to lock yourself in position and press another to fire a crossbow in that direction.

It was surprising to me how tricky it was – not only to just do the navigating, but also to realise that, thanks to my main interactions with a keyboard being WASD and the letter/punctuation keys, there are some parts of the keyboard layout that my brain doesn’t seem to “see” as readily as others. For example, I was forever forgetting the number line, as well as experiencing a degree of trepidation when it came to pressing keys that in another game might prompt something weird to happen – the Windows key was definitely one of them.

But I really like how polished it is in terms of how it looks and the inventive minigame feel that the preview has. I’m looking forward to seeing what the full game does. It’s currently set for a 2017 release.

3 Comments

There’s a calibration bit where you tell it the shape of your enter key and whether it’s an extended keyboard or not, so I think the spatial movement is just tied to that rather than what they keys map to outside that game. The puns about fetching T might not translate given it would be a different point on the keyboard tho!